Learning how to ride a bike is extremely difficult at first. Once you've learned, it takes no obvious skill, you just let your body get on with it. Meditation is a bit like that. The more you do it, the easier it gets. Except that learning to ride a bike is much harder than learning to meditate.
There are so many traditions and disciplines that employ meditation and promote no end of varied and contradictory methods and practices. Most of them claiming to be the only true path to enlightenment. Meditation gets built up into this massive spiritual 'big deal' that only accomplished Yogis and Buddhist Monks can get to grips with.
Listening to you breath can be done in any situation, place or time. I find that it works really well when I'm driving or doing some repetitive task. I've often done it in a bored moment at a party, when observing the goings on from the edges of things, or even in a meeting when things have got tedious. So'ham simply helps to flip from being fully immersed in the goings on around you, to being just one step detached from things, going from being an actor in the play to being a member of the audience. There is nothing more to it than that.
Why do it at all?
That only becomes obvious when you notice that you simply feel better for doing it.
There are so many traditions and disciplines that employ meditation and promote no end of varied and contradictory methods and practices. Most of them claiming to be the only true path to enlightenment. Meditation gets built up into this massive spiritual 'big deal' that only accomplished Yogis and Buddhist Monks can get to grips with.
The point about 'So'ham' or 'breathing' meditation, (see: Friday 18th December 2009 'Meditation De-Mystified') is that it doesn't need any special time, place, discipline or method to be of use. You can sit down in a special place set aside for meditation, at a set time, in a very disciplined way, and if that's your bag, you'll get a lot of benefit from it. But all of that is so unnecessary.
Listening to you breath can be done in any situation, place or time. I find that it works really well when I'm driving or doing some repetitive task. I've often done it in a bored moment at a party, when observing the goings on from the edges of things, or even in a meeting when things have got tedious. So'ham simply helps to flip from being fully immersed in the goings on around you, to being just one step detached from things, going from being an actor in the play to being a member of the audience. There is nothing more to it than that.
It's especially handy when someone, or some situation, is doing it's very best to piss you off.
I recommend starting by not making a big, disciplinary epic of the whole thing. Just try a bit of 'So'ham' when you're driving, travelling on the bus, waiting in the queue at the bank...
Where observation leads sometimes may be tedious and obvious, sometimes full of insight and, very occasionally, deeply spiritual. There is no point approaching the act of observation with expectations- the two aren't compatible - what you observe is what it is and no more.
I recommend starting by not making a big, disciplinary epic of the whole thing. Just try a bit of 'So'ham' when you're driving, travelling on the bus, waiting in the queue at the bank...
Where observation leads sometimes may be tedious and obvious, sometimes full of insight and, very occasionally, deeply spiritual. There is no point approaching the act of observation with expectations- the two aren't compatible - what you observe is what it is and no more.
Why do it at all?
That only becomes obvious when you notice that you simply feel better for doing it.
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